Proximity News Theme for WordPress

This theme claims to be the most advanced News Theme available. Is it?

This theme has a nice clean crisp look, but so do many of the News Themes out there. What makes this theme special is what is under the hood. Let’s take a peek.

From their website:

With so many themes calling themselves “news” themes these days, it’s hard to decide which theme you should go with. Should you risk putting down $60-$100 for a theme you know nothing about?  Should you try a free theme, and see how far you can get?  We understand.  We’re here to help.Proximity was developed primarily for ease of use, and I don’t use that phrase lightly.  Just take a look at our instructional videos before you purchase.  If you don’t agree that Proximity News is the easiest theme to install and set up, feel free to keep shopping around.  But we’re pretty confident that you’ll agree, and be publishing content in no time!

Custom Header Image

It’s surprising how few themes allow you to upload, crop, and activate a new header image from the back-end.  Not Proximity News.  We made sure that your new header is just a few clicks away … no code editing involved!

Theme Options

The innovative Options panel in Proximity News is one of the most advanced available.  Choose from options ranging from excluding pages from your top navigation, to choosing an alternate feed URL, to adding your own adsense code, all from the Proximity News Theme Options panel.  The home page is also completely configured from within this panel, so say goodbye to the days of editing code to get things working out of the box.

Drop-down Navigation

The main horizontal navigation bar features drop-down menus for easy browsing of the pages you create from within WordPress.  Simply place a page under another page by making it a “child page”, and it will automatically be added to the drop-down of the parent page.

“Smart” Home Page

As mentioned before, the homepage content is pulled using the options you select in the Options panel.  But what I didn’t mention was that the homepage has “intelligent” characteristics too.  The code has been written in such a way as to completely avoid duplicate content, without using categories.  Too many themes rely on excluding categories as a means of avoiding duplicate content.  Proximity’s smart homepage will NEVER let posts fall into the archives, just because you haven’t taken them out of the “feature” category.

Archives/Blog Page Template

For readers that prefer a more simplistic means of browsing content, you can always set up an “Archives” page that displays posts in reverse chronological order.

Advanced Sidebar

The sidebar keeps things clean with features like a spot for a video, a tabbed section, and an adsense block.  The tabbed section is pre-styled and ready for the Popularity Contest and Most Commented plugins too, so all you have to do is activate them, and watch the content show up.  The featured video and adsense code can be entered using the Proximity News Theme Options panel too!  And under the adsense section, you’ll find a fully widgetized sidebar ready for you to place custom content*.

*not all widgets supported

Pretty Category Archives

Let’s face it.  Browsing most WordPress sites’ category archive can be a little bland.  Taking a page from many major news sites’ playbook, I decided to make Proximity display category archives in a much more attractive way.  You can now split up your site into categories and not be embarrassed by the end result.  Take our demo US News section as an example.

Author Archives

Our author archive page is, in many ways, even better than our category archives.  It pulls the author bio and link from the main WordPress database (configured in the user options), and pulls the author’s Gravatar based on their email address.  It then pulls stories written by that author in a very attractive way.  See our demo author archive for a sample.

Search

Our search results page was meant to mimmic the simplicity of a Google search.  Future versions of the search results page will feature keyword highlighting too, so stay tuned for that!

Single Post Templates, second to none!

Our single post template was inspired by hours of research on other major news sites.  It features social bookmarking links, a print stylesheet to make printing stories a breeze, integration with the related entries plugin to encourage your readers to continue browsing your site, and a comments section featureing commenter Gravatars.  Just take a look at this single post demo to see what I mean.

Story Thumbnails

Each story can have both a 300×200 and a 100×100 pixel image attached to it via custom fields.  These images will be used throughout the theme to help bring a bit of spice to your stories, encouraging clickthroughs and giving your site that professional look that so many WordPress themes lack.  And if you ever forget or neglect to attach an image properly, the theme is smart enough to insert a backup image for you, so your story doesn’t look empty, and the theme doesn’t break.  Neat, huh?

Breadcrumb Navigation

Whenever viewing an interior page, you’ll notice little grey links under the main navigation.  This bit of custom code was implemented to make sure your readers always know where they are on the site. And… it’s all automatic!  No author input required!

And So Much More …

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